Prescribed burning mitigates the severity of subsequent wildfires in Mediterranean shrublands

Background Prescribed burning (PB) is becoming relevant in fuel reduction and thus fire hazard abatement in fire-prone ecosystems of southern Europe. Yet, empirical evidence on the effectiveness of this practice to mitigate wildfire severity in Mediterranean shrublands is non-existent, despite being the focus of PB efforts in this region. Here, we intended to quantify the protective effect of PB treatment units (2005–2021) to subsequent wildfire severity in shrublands across mainland Portugal, as well as the relative contribution and complex interactions between drivers of wildfire severity in PB-treated areas and untreated neighboring counterparts through Random Forest regression. We leveraged cloud-computing remote sensing data processing in Google Earth Engine to estimate fire severity (PB and wildfire) as the Relativized Burn Ratio (RBR) using Landsat data catalog. Results PB treatment was particularly effective at mitigating wildfire severity at the first PB-wildfire encounter in shrublands, with a mean reduction of around 24% in RBR units. Fuel age (i.e., time since prescribed burning) in PB-wildfire intersection areas overwhelmed to a large extent the effect of fire weather, burning probability, and PB severity. The mitigating effect of PB on wildfire severity persisted for a fuel age of around 5 years. However, this effect decreased with increasingly adverse fire weather conditions, such that variation in wildfire severity was somewhat insensitive to fuel age under extreme fire weather. Similarly, the lowest wildfire severity experienced in sites with high burning probability, along with the interaction effect observed between burning probability and fuel age, suggest that repeated PB treatments may be useful in controlling fuel accumulation and mitigating wildfire severity. The relative contribution of fire weather in explaining wildfire severity was exceedingly high in untreated areas, doubling that of the other variables in the model in the absence of PB treatment variables. Conclusions Our results suggest that the implementation of PB treatments at intervals of less than 5 years is of paramount importance to control fuel build-up and fire hazard under extreme fire weather in productive Mediterranean shrublands. Further research on this topic is warranted in other shrublands worldwide, namely in Mediterranean-type climate regions.